ER nurse says burned boy told her 'daddy' held him in hot water

Emergency room nurses from University Medical Center testified Monday a 3-year-old brought in with second- and third-degree burns a year ago said his “daddy” held him in hot water.

The three were part of an abbreviated session in the trial of Trenard Nunley, 21, on a charge of knowingly injuring a child.

Nunley is accused of immersing his girlfriend’s son, Jalen Shaw, in water hot enough to cause second- and third-degree burns over the boy’s legs, buttocks and genitals.

The incident occurred in January 2012.

District Judge Jim Bob Darnell recessed the trial early because prosecutors had called all the witnesses available to call Tuesday.

The prosecution’s case moved quickly in part because Crook declined to cross-examine several witnesses in Tuesday’s first day of testimony.

The trial will resume at 8:45 a.m. today.

Charissa Barber, one of the three who testified, said she was working near Jalen’s head in the UMC emergency room, before he was transferred to the burn unit.

She told the nine-man, three-woman jury that she asked the boy what happened.

She said Jalen answered, “My daddy put me in a hot bath and held me in there until I cried.”

Defense attorney David Crook objected to the testimony as hearsay, but District Judge Jim Bob Darnell overruled him.

Barber then testified she noticed what appeared to be an old bruise near the child’s left eye and a reddening of the sclera — the white of his eye — in the corner of his left eye.

She said he replied, “Daddy hit me with a chair.”

Two other nurses reported similar statements.

In other testimony, a Lubbock police investigator and a forensic specialist described that showed the water temperature at the tub outlet would quickly reach 140 degrees.

Officer Steve Farley, said he timed the test, and that the water reached that temperature in “just shy of a minute.”

Working with a photograph of the tub’s plumbing, Farley explained that one handle turned the water on and controlled the volume coming through the spout, while a second dial — one which had no built-in stops — allowed the user to control the temperature.

When prosecutor Barron Slack asked how easily someone could realize the water was hot, Farley testified that steam became visible.

“You could feel the heat coming off it,” Farley said.

The morning’s testimony included a display of photographs Lubbock Police Officer Rosa Cox took of Jalen’s injuries after paramedics took the boy to University Medical Center for treatment.

In an unusual move, prosecutors displayed those photographs on a flat screen monitor so that only the jury, District Judge Jim Bob Darnell and parties to the case could see.

Cox narrated the photographs, talking about the blisters and skin sloughing from the boy’s legs and buttocks, and how his genitalia was blistered and swollen.

A detective from LPD’s identification division, Garland Timms, was on the stand for an hour Tuesday morning, testifying about photographs he took of the East Lubbock apartment Nunley and girlfriend Candace Sanders shared.

Those photographs, displayed on a standard projection screen included close-ups of a child’s underpants, with a red stain on the rear waistband that Timms said appeared to be diluted blood, and flecks of what the detective said appeared to be skin that had sloughed off.

The jury also saw a photo Timms took of the apartment’s water heater, which the detective noted, has no external control knob for managing the temperature.

The two paramedics who came to the home after a woman, apparently Sanders, called 911 to report her son’s blistered skin, also testified about what they saw, and how Nunley changed his story about how the boy was scalded.

The paramedics testified that Nunley initially said he drew a bath for Jalen to clean him up after he’d urinated on himself, then fell asleep; Jalen climbed into the tub on his own.

As they left, according to the paramedics’ report, Nunley told them Jalen had turned the hot water on in the tub himself.

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Going beyond

The morning’s testimony took a turn for the heartstrings as emergency medical technical Lesli Henley, recalled going on a call a year ago for what had been reported as a hemorrhage and blistering.

Henley said she and EMT partner Tommy Philip entered the apartment and found a little boy standing there wearing a shirt and no pants, his underwear in his hand.

“He had a lost look in his eyes,” Henley said of Jalen Shaw, the victim in a child abuse case tried this week before District Judge Jim Bob Darnell.

“A man I thought was his daddy yelled at him to throw down his underwear, and he did,” Henley said.

She talked of wrapping in him a burn sheet — a special, sterile fabric used with burn patients because their wounds sometimes ooze, causing cloth to stick to the patients — starting an intravenous feed, administering pain medication and taking him to the hospital.

And under questioning from lead prosecutor Sunshine Stanek, Henley talked of something else — bringing her own children to visit Jalen in the burn unit at University Medical Center.

“There are certain calls that bother you,” Henley told the jury. “I just pictured that little boy as if he were my own child.”